Finding Subject Matter to Write About

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Stuck for Something to Write About? Go Way Back!

Having ‘writer’s block’ is a common problem, even for experienced writers and if you are new to writing it can stop you in your tracks.
I came across a way to get the old grey cells fired up completely by accident the other day.

I wasn’t actually Trying to write an article at all at the time; I was researching an old domain on Internet Archive Wayback Machine to decide whether or not the previous content would harm a future website on that domain.

I wanted to see what the old website was and found I could bookmark the pages…
and the outbound links to other websites worked!
They went to more archived pages on other websites.

Writers of articles tend to link to relevant authority sites, and those have a good chance of having snapshots in Wayback machine.

Sources of Inspiration

But I also found that through the Comments author links, I could find all sorts of websites that usually had some relation to the original article subject matter, and they had categories that gave me lots of ideas.

By clicking on a category I was able to see loads of article headings. They were a rich source of ideas for writing.

I do know this can be done in current time just by using a search engine, but I was finding old stuff on sites that don’t exist any more.

It was fascinating, and I realised it was giving me an insight into how things have changed and developed over the years. It enriched my knowledge about the subject, making it much easier to write naturally. I began to be able to have opinions of my own on something about which I previously knew little.

Don’t Plagiarize

I’m not suggesting you should copy, that’s a really bad idea, but rather use what you find to act as a springboard for ideas.
You can find article subjects by choosing a category from the side menu and look at the page of results.
That will immediately give you a load of headings that can be explored.

You could read the ones that catch your eye or stop there and just use those to start writing.
Sometimes this is so effective that it fills your head with ideas, so while you are writing, what should you do with new ideas that come into your head?

Make A Reference File

The file need only be a .txt file you keep handy, on your desktop perhaps. There’s no big program to load and it opens really quickly. You can use it while you are reading or writing to jot down ideas. Keep it simple.

An hour of reading and taking notes of headlines, points and snippets gave me a reference file I could open any time I was stuck for something to write about.

What do you find to inspire your article writing? You can let me know in the comments below.

I will talk more about writing processes in another article…
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